** FORREST GUMP
(Worth seeing) Directed by Robert Zemeckis Written by Eric Roth With Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Mykelti Williamson, Sally Field, Michael Humphreys, and Hanna Hall.
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“Of all the forms of genius,” Thornton Wilder wrote in The Woman of Andros (1930), “goodness has the longest awkward age”; five years later he made this the epigraph for his Heaven’s My Destination, a novel about another saintly fool. The figure whose moral purity leads to endless comic complications is also a staple in many of Frank Capra’s best-known movies–and is central to Leo McCarey’s underrated Good Sam, which can be read as a sort of dialectical response to Capra. In fact it’s a tradition in American thought extending well beyond the movies: Forrest Gump has many literary precedents apart from the novel by Winston Grooms (which I haven’t read) on which Eric Roth’s screenplay is said to be vaguely based. One can trace related fancies in the ironies of Jewish novelists such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud (both of whom undoubtedly influenced Woody Allen’s Zelig, one of Forrest Gump’s more obvious sources) and in the whimsy of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Joseph Heller, and other “black humor” novelists. Benjy, the literal idiot who narrates the first section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, offers an even stronger (but less comic) analogy.
One is tempted to say, with apologies to Wilder, that of all the myths of innocence that have spurred this country on, from George Washington to O.J. Simpson, the myth that innocence is goodness (and vice versa) has surely had the longest awkward age; we haven’t yet outgrown it. Even Wilder and Faulkner bought into it, and it still dictates not only a good deal of our literature and movies but much of our foreign policy. From beginning to end, Forrest Gump plays this myth like a grand organ.
Through it all Forrest remains firmly lodged in our affections because, aside from his unwavering loyalty to his mother and his few friends–Jenny and two Vietnam buddies, Bubba (Mykelti Williamson) and Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise)–he literally doesn’t know what he’s doing. Whatever he becomes a part of–Vietnam, the antiwar movement, Watergate, new-age spiritualism, capitalist success–his sanctity is guaranteed by the fact that he knows how to follow orders, letting others determine his fate. Just like Oliver North, he’ll stand on his head if someone in authority tells him to. His lack of guile and volition (“Shit happens”) becomes our ultimate safeguard–he’s living proof that good-natured innocence will enable us to survive and even prevail as inert, uncritical spectators of the passing parade. Like Forrest we may lose most of our loved ones along the way, but after all we still have our TV sets.
It often suits our vanity to say that the wind blows us this way and that way, that life is ineffably absurd and loaded with ironic twists: it’s a philosophical escape hatch, freeing us of all responsibility. But Forrest Gump is actually predicated less on arbitrary fate than on the pleasure of two forms of redemptive innocence. There’s the innocence of Forrest Gump toward American life and history: we’re asked to be charmed by yet feel superior to his fool’s progress. Then there’s the innocent nostalgia of our own more “sophisticated” (i.e., jaded) view of American life and history, which is assumed and imposed by the movie–a cornucopia of received media ideas, images, and artifacts–and which we’re not supposed to question. Eventually these two levels of innocence–which might be more rudely defined as two levels of stupidity–merge, so that by the film’s end Forrest Gump’s innocence is felt to be a higher form of wisdom: our own. It’s a classic American myth, the celebration of stupidity as redemption, and the “whims of fate” idea is little more than a smokescreen for the highly orchestrated marketing campaign that puts it across.
